I am looking for a professional freelance editor to do front-end editing for me. Does anyone have any recommendations? I am looking for someone with experience working with cozy mysteries, or mysteries in general, and can work well with a relatively new author.

Are you looking for someone to do spelling, grammar checking and sentence structure? Or someone to do a critique and all the other aforementioned grammatical checking? I personally have edited three books for the Pastor of a church ministry where I formerly worked. A lot of editing can be done yourself if you get the proper books or buy software to do it for you. An excellent book William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White have a book called: The Elements of Style which I used to edit the books I mentions. Strunk and White also have a book on grammar.

You're looking for an Editor, huh? Might I suggest Book Editor Michael Garrett? He's a freelance Editor with great credentials that are easy to verify. He's also credited as Stephen King's first Editor and is recommended by Predators & Editors. Although I haven't called on him myself, he's the first on my list if I ever decide to hire an Editor--his credentials are impressive, and he doesn't seem to have any shady business deals that I've been able to weedle out. Another nice plus is that his services are cheaper than others.

Here's the link to his website, so you can do your own research on him: http://www.writing2sell.com/critique.htm

Go to grubstreet.org - Grub Street is the heart of the literary community in Boston and they have seasoned professional editors. Don't know where you live (although not all of them are Boston-based) so it might have to be through email and phone, but I wouldn't look anywhere else. I just hired one myself from their list. Do your research and "interview" several and get references. Good luck!

I just have to counter Violet M's recommendation of Strunk & White's Elements of Style. Here's a portion of what I've previously written about it:

The American bible for latter day prescriptivists is the oft-cited The Elements of Style by William Strunk
and E.B. White—a university professor and a writer born in 1869 and 1899,
respectively. It has sold over 10 million copies and celebrated its 50th
anniversary in 2009. Such celebrations prompted Professor Geoffrey Pullum,
linguist and co-author of The Cambridge
Grammar of the English Language, to pen “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice.”
In criticizing Elements he says, “Its
advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous
influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has
significantly degraded it.”

In particular, Pullen discredits the authors’ denigration of the passive
construction, as they are “so grammatically clueless that they don’t know what
is a passive construction and what isn’t. Of the four pairs of examples offered
to show readers what to avoid and to correct it, a staggering three out of the
four are mistaken diagnoses.”

One such example: “There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the
ground.” As Pullum notes, this has no sign of the passive in it. A passive construction
commonly employs the object of an active sentence as its grammatical subject, typically
followed by a be-verb and a past participle. So we have the active “People on
the left hate Rush Limbaugh” construction becoming “Rush Limbaugh is hated by
people on the left” in the passive.

Elements’ harmful influence doesn’t
end at the walls of ivory towers; mistaught students graduate and enter the
wider world citing and praising this fraudulent little tome. So we get novelists
as prolific as Stephen King, in his instructutional On Writing, making this blanket statement in italics: “You should avoid the passive tense. I’m
not the only one who says so; you can find the same advice in The Elements of Style.” This is an
amusing example of prescriptivists’ over-generalized proscriptions, for like
the two misguided authors of Elements,
King ignores his own silly advice and begins On Writing with, “I was stunned by Mary Karr’s memoir, The Liar’s Club.”